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Comment by GlennCSmith | Hacker News Reader

I don't see where the author's reasoning is weak. A female tech lead / founder tried the standard way to get better representation of women at Google: try to hire more women, and found out there weren't enough highly qualified candidates to significantly move the numbers in the desired direction. Then as a founder herself, she tried to hire a higher percentage of women, and found there weren't enough candidates. She compared two approaches to fixing that: lowering standards (with negative effects she outlined), and generating more candidates from colleges. She recommends the later approach. The argument isn't novel, but it's also not made in a vacuum or from an ivory tower as she tried the "try harder" approach down in the trenches more than once, and so suggests "try different" instead.

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Again: everyone knows the candidate pool is overwhelmingly comprised of men. There's no real dispute anywhere about this fact. It's not part of the debate; there is no debate about it. Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.

That makes that part of the argument in her post a kind of straw man.

> Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.

You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.

As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".

The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.

Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.

No, you're relying on a false dichotomy here. The logic in your post suggests that if I believe it's unreasonable to expect gender parity at Google, I must also believe that the current gender distribution at Google is OK. That doesn't follow logically.

The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.

It's better not to think about vote scores here at all.

> You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10

tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.

Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.

Thanks for the context.

I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.

> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.

Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".

I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.

Doesn't that kind of point to an alternate solution, that the entire interview by interrogation coding process is the problem (if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out) and they should be doing the mentor approach/internship for all junior programmers instead of the rigid pass/fail requirement. One of the problems with their current approach is similar to the college hazing ritual, all the upperclassmen went through it, so they're going to make everyone else suffer through it as well.

And how do you determine who gets to be mentored in an internship?

Unless you take all candidates, you are back to reducing the pool to a more manageable size, presumably using classic interview techniques.

And unless the mentors are biased, this still doesn't change the fact that your hires as a population will be similar to the applicants.

> if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out

Will they? What if women stay in their roles longer than men? Then, you would less often be replacing women.

If men more often apply to new jobs, that could explain why the candidate ratio is more skewed than the ratio of actual workers.

It's some of undeterminate without data on longevity because on the other hand we could hypothesize that even with equal gender representation initially maybe men would stay longer because women want to spend time raising children and that would skew things. Also, there might be some self filtering as you described in the last sentence where I could speculate that maybe the average man is used to being rejected a lot so they apply more to places that are hailed as hard to get into, though with the 30% figure female representation in CS touted elsewhere in this thread, it leaves the question where are these 30% women going to in CS?

Note: The percentage of women in computing is roughly 25%. I don't know how she got the 90% and 98% numbers.

My understanding was that was what she was seeing in the candidate pools for jobs when she was a hiring manager, not the overall percentage of women in computing.

It's in the text next to the 90%

> But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there.

If men changed jobs more often than women [1], or sent more applications to other companies (as a means of getting a raise at their current company), could that anecdotally make it seem like the ratio is more skewed than it really is?

I mean, if men are more often "candidates" for moving between jobs, then it would, right?

If that were true, then an employer wanting a more loyal or longer term employee might seek out more women.

[1] I have no evidence for any of this.

My personal anecdote filtering candidates for three years in the 1990's for a video game studio was 100's of male candidates submitted their resume for programming positions versus three females at that stage. We interviewed two of the women (the third took a job in another industry before we had the chance to interview her) and made offers to the other two of them.

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